Re: Apple, wake up! *You* lose!

[cgay@majestix.cs.uoregon.edu]

    Date: Thu, 24 Feb 94 17:27:34 EST
    From: hall@research.att.com (Bob Hall)
    
        Date: Thu, 24 Feb 94 13:34:23 -0800
        From: "Carl L. Gay" <cgay@skinner.cs.uoregon.edu>
        [...]
        Since Dylan is a language rather than a development environment, I
        don't think you have to worry about this.  Development environments
        for Dylan will be provided by third parties (such as the Gwydion group
        at CMU) even if Apple provides one too.  So, IF Apple doesn't
        decide to axe the Dylan group before the language design is complete,
        this won't be a problem.  And even if they did drop Dylan, maybe the
        CMU folks would finalize the design...who knows.
    
    Lisp, being a language, won't die either.  Why would a third party effort
    supporting an environment for some wacky new language be more likely
    to survive than one supporting Lisp?  

I didn't say that it would, or mean to suggest that.  I simply meant
that Dylan as a language will not necessarily die if Apple does not
come out with an implementation of it.  People seem to confuse Dylan
the language with implementations thereof.  (The only implementation
that I've heard announced is the CMU one, which presumably will not
run on the Mac, since CMU CL doesn't.)

I think there *are* some reasons to believe Dylan as a language could
be more successful than CL in the long run, but this isn't the place
to discuss them.

BTW, lest anyone jump to the conclusion that I was defending Apple's
decision to drop MCL, that's not the case.  MCL was one of the main
reasons why I bought a Mac.  It seems clear from other postings that
MCL generates a lot of hardware sales.